David Roth's Weak In Review: Power Football In August, And Always

Just as we do not assess being alive by considering the experience of nursing a sinus headache on a long bus ride to Indianapolis, we should not judge humanity by its most egregious football fans. There are smart, sober-sided people and totally kindhearted idiots alike who care about this awful and awe-ing and inexcusable and totally absorbing sport, and who care about the whole horrible, gripping thing—the jagged violence and the meticulous structure; the blaring vapid horned-up commerce and the thin blue flame of authentic human brilliance on which it's all leveraged—in ways that are well-considered or loving or both. Football has many, many problems, just as life periodically throws at us sinus headaches and Greyhound trips to The City By The Land and all manner of other shittinesses. This is just how it goes, but it is better to be alive than not, and football is more fun than not-football.

This is not to say that football is good for any of us, though, and what was otherwise a week of deep August nothing brought one reminder of this after another. Some of this is familiar off-the-rack assholery with ambient football notes—Pro Football Talk taking a break from its usual slate of training camp reports and avant-garde syntax to solicit social media #engagement in the form of prison rape jokes, for instance, or Steelers LB James Harrison's defiant stance against rewarding his six-year-old child for anything but total victory. This is awfully stupid stuff, but it's also August stuff, and the sort of thing we tend to hear during the weeks-long soundcheck of the NFL's noise machine that precedes the start of the regular season.

Even during the year, a decent percentage of the NFL conversation works this way, and while that's not exactly ideal, it could be said to serve a healthy purpose to the extent that every idiotic, hateful comment-section bile-burp and seething ragefart tweeted against Robert Griffin III is at least not being said out loud. Think of the NFL's most reliably hacked-off armchair authoritarians—the comment section militants and weirdo partisans and all those droopy, demanding boomers fantasizing about dressing down some recalcitrant millionaire linebacker from the safety of a pair of coach khakis—as human-sized coal-burning power plants. Then think of the NFL's bizarre power-violence fantasia as a form of carbon capture, catching the variously toxic pollutants and particulates thrown off in the process and sequestering them safely in the comment section of an article about Dez Bryant's contract, where no reasonable person will ever have to encounter it.

Anyway, that's the positive way to look at it. But this is football, and so it is not quite as clean as all that. Football is an implicating thing, and the desperate dudgeon of the football discourse can be seen, in some sense, as a backhanded acknowledgement of this. The more we hear about what the game does to the people playing it, the louder the Man Up Men's Chorus sings its little marching songs. Things get worse and more difficult to deny, and the chanting gets louder, until the whole stadium moves, an oval mile of taxpayer-funded concrete shimmying like a three-year-old throwing a shit-fit in a supermarket.

Football treats its players roughly in ways that go beyond the game's familiar and frankly desensitizing violence. The game makes strength the servant of power, and the former is inevitably much more admirable than the latter. Power, as we see it in the NFL and at the highest levels in college but also as we see it in many other places, is a less accountable and much more troublesome thing. That lack of accountability is the thrill for a certain type of scolding football fan, the kind that live to demand and discipline and catch a contact high from football's ambient authoritarianisms. As easy as it is to see the appeal of this sort of imperial fantasy in a world of insecurity and contingency and worry, though, it is equally easy to see just how dangerous this sort of power is—what and who it negates and harms, and the morally null entropy it serves—in action.

And it is easy to see in the case of Baylor University's handling of Sam Ukwuachu, a star defensive lineman that the school pursued after he left Boise State amid credible allegations of violence against women—and despite, it appears, being warned that Ukwuachu was a bad actor by his then-coach, Chris Petersen. After Ukwuachu raped a fellow student at Baylor, the school cleared him after a cursory investigation, kept him on scholarship and in the practice facility after he had been indicted on a felony sexual assault charge, and aimed to get him on the field this season. On Thursday night, Ukwuachu was convicted of sexual assault. Later on Thursday night, the school issued a series of flatlined legalisms that began, "Acts of sexual violence contradict every value Baylor University upholds as a caring Christian community." On Friday, coach Art Briles insisted that he'd never had the conversation with Petersen and hopefully, forcefully tried to steer the conversation back to football.

In a narrow sense, Ukwuachu's predatory vileness and the organizational cynicism that enabled it are both outliers. But there is a queasy familiarity to all this, echoes of stories from Florida State and Vanderbilt and Missouri and Yale and elsewhere in, as Jessica Luther and Dan Solomon detail at Texas Monthly, the way that the school vacated its responsibility to protect a student, the local police their mandate to investigate in a timely fashion, and the local media its charge to ask difficult questions. Every decision to look away from something horrific and off-message, every excuse made in the breach, the tragic mealymouthing and the triply vetted semi-apologies in the wake—we know all this, already, because we have seen football programs and the institutions that support those programs do it all so often.

If we know it because it keeps happening, we also know it because it is becoming harder not to know it. This is the other violence that football does, the deeper desensitizing—because it is so lucrative, and because it is so intoxicating, and because so many people so enjoy this particular power trip, the same vile decisions and elisions and excuses keep getting made. At some level, in some passive way, coaches and administrators and fan bases have decided that this is a violence they can live with.

This vision of power devolves, ultimately, into an excuse not to care, and so it goes all the way up. Each party to all this, in some way, is secure in the belief that "because I want it, and because I can" is justification enough to escape implication or judgment. Some of them, horribly, are right. So of course it gets so loud around football season, even when there are not yet any games to shout about. There's just so much to drown out.